I am so excited to share this tutorial with you. This brings me back to my childhood and the time my grandma first introduced me to natural dyeing. It was exactly this, dyeing Easter eggs with onion skins. I still remember how we started looking for eggs and onion skins in the kitchen. Then she said let’s go for a walk and find some leaves to print with. I was looking for the tiniest ones and we ran back home full of joy and laughter. Granny found some woollen string and bits of fabric, I had no idea what they were for, but I quickly found out. With such a quick and fun activity she showed me that you can use leaves and plants to extract colour and you don’t need to go far to be creative-start with your kitchen. I still try to dye eggs every Easter and share them with friends and family. If you have children they will absolutely love this, so just follow the simple steps below and have fun!
What you will need:
What you will need:
- Raw eggs
- Onion skins (red,brown or both)
- Cooking pot
- Leaves
- Squares of fabric
- String
We will be wrapping raw eggs in leaves and onion skins, using squares of fabric to hold them together with string. For this tutorial I am using brown eggs, simply because I was not able to find any white ones at the shop. If you can, I really recommend using lighter ones because you will get a stronger print.
You might get some colours from the leaves you pick, but our main purpose of them is to get a resist print - a plant shape on an orange background from onion skins. Take your egg and place your leaves wherever you prefer and cover the leaf with onion skins. Make sure the skins are tightly wrapped around the egg. Take your bit of fabric and tie everything together. This will hold it in place while cooking. Do the same with all your eggs.
- If you’re having problems placing your leaves on the eggs, you can wet the eggs or soak your leaves in water
- If you don’t have any leaves you can use anything else, even wrapping string or rubber around your egg. That will give you lines.
Now that your eggs are nicely wrapped, you’re ready to cook them. It’s up to you how long for, but I recommend 20 minutes so they will be hard boiled.
Fill your pot up with cold water and position you eggs inside. Place it over medium heat and close the lid. Don’t let the eggs boil too quickly. You want to give onions a bit of time to release colour.
This is after 10 minutes, as you can see the colour is already pretty strong. If you like eggs medium boiled then you can take one out and check if anything printed. Just be careful not to burn yourself.
After suggested 20 minutes, shock your eggs with cold water, allow them to cool down and they’re ready to unwrap!
I chose thicker bits of fabric because I knew the onion skins will leave marks and I can later slow stitch over them. Clean your eggs from any leaves or skins. You can rinse them and they are ready to look at and eat.
I love that I even got bits of green from some leaves and it’s great that I couldn’t find any lighter coloured eggs. We now know that you can colour darker ones as well. For comparison the next picture is from another year with lighter eggs so you can see the difference.
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, please tag me in your egg colouring pictures on social media and share this with your friends. I can’t wait to see what you all come up with! Happy Easter everybody.
| | | |
 |  |
